Archives for September 2014

Carl Phillips reads from his book of poetry, Double Shadow, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a frequent contributor to NER, most recently with his essay “Beautiful Dreamer” in NER 35.2, and in 35.1 with his poems “Spring” and “By Force.”

August 19, 2012

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013), Double Shadow (2011), and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (2007). His 2004 collection, The Rest of Love, won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available on iTunesU. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

We are pleased to announce that fiction writer and New England Review contributorT. L. Khleif will receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, which is given annually to six writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. The Awards are $30,000 each and will be presented to the six recipients on September 18th in New York City.

T. L. Khleif received a BA from Brown University, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she is a lecturer. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review and the Normal School, and she is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Ms. Khleif is working on a novel tentatively titled The Absence of Layla Halabi, and will use her Writer’s Award to take time off from teaching to focus on this novel full time.

Celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program in 1995. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded nearly $2 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Elif Batuman, Eula Biss, Lan Samantha Chang, Rivka Galchen, Aryn Kyle, Rebecca Lee, ZZ Packer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Tiphanie Yanique.

In the days before personal computers, when Xeroxing books was a punishable crime, I hand-typed the entirety of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade for my personal collection, as such a book was not generally available in 1980s Las Vegas. I’d borrowed a copy from the UNLV library. Marat/Sade is a play written by the German postwar playwright Peter Weiss. Weiss incorporates a play within the play, one written by de Sade, to be performed by his fellow inmates at the Charenton asylum. So Weiss’s actors play lunatics staging de Sade’s play, and also act as various historical figures with whom de Sade has philosophical dialogues.

What was the appeal, for a fifteen-year-old girl, of a story about a nihilistic and lecherous Revolution-era Frenchman—portrayed by a postwar German avant-gardist—who writes and directs a play in an insane asylum? In Marat/Sade, an actress plays a somnambulist who plays the part of Charlotte Corday, assassin of the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, as he lay in the bathtub. Marat is played by a paranoid schizophrenic. The radical priest Jacques Roux, who stabbed himself to death in prison, is played by an inmate in a straightjacket. These characters felt very true to me, their concerns urgent ones. They screamed for freedom, and for justice, and then broke into ecstatic singing, and laughed until the asylum staff beat them back into the corners.

The passage that affected me most was a conversation between the Marquis de Sade and Jean-Paul Marat on the nature of life and death. Peter Weiss wrote this dialogue between the two historical figures—who had never met in real life—as a playing-out of the psychological motivations behind the French Revolution, about which I knew very little at that time.

MARAT:I read in your books de Sade in one of your immortal works that the basis of all life is death

SADE:Correct, Marat But man has given a false importance to death Any animal plant or man who dies adds to Nature’s compost heap becomes the manure without which nothing could grow nothing could be created Death is simply part of the process Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature . . .

The Marquis goes on like that, and Marat counters:

Against Nature’s silence I use action In the vast indifference I invent a meaning I don’t watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them . . .

It was always important to intervene and say this and this are wrong—Marat’s argument here was solid. I couldn’t understand what he meant, though, about inventing meaning against nature’s silence. Meaning was not something you could paste onto death. It was like the Marquis de Sade said, death was important only insofar as it made way for new life, and nature didn’t care about either.

I hadn’t really thought about nature until then—I lived in Las Vegas and didn’t think deserts counted as nature. Though often I would stand in my backyard at night and look up at the stars. They were indifferent to me. The vast treeless sand-scape of Vegas, the mountains that dwarfed the casinos in the valley—all unmoved by my small, individual experience. Surely, it mattered little to the stars or trees whether I lived or died. The house next door looked as calm as it ever did, even though our neighbor Mark had died only the year before. I eventually decided that the Marquis de Sade also meant human nature, because he realized that the heart of man was fundamentally apathetic and all acts of kindness manipulation and façade.

I spent a year’s worth of evenings in my father’s office typing up Marat/Sade. I did not know how to type properly and did not intend to learn. I typed and retyped the words until I had a complete manuscript. I had never been so close to anything in my life as I became to that text. I learned its message letter by letter, and when I was finished, I never read the play again.

Stefany Anne Golberg is a writer and artist located in Schwenksville, PA. She is a columnist for the Smart Set magazine and Critic-in-Residence at Drexel University.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings.

” . . . a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay.”

We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Michael Cohen‘s essay collection, A Place to Read: Life and Books (Interactive Press). The book includes an investigative essay published in NER31.4 as well as The King in Winter, which appeared as an NER digital.

From Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review: “Michael Cohen’s essays on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader.”

“Each [piece] is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite. Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp . . .” —E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

Since retiring from university teaching, Michael Cohen’s essays have appeared in Harvard Review, Birding, the Humanist, Missouri Review, and the Kenyon Review in addition to NER. He is also the author of five books, including a poetry text, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace, 1983) and an award winning book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Georgia, 1989).

Congratulations to NER contributor Carl Phillips on the publication of his collection of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination(Graywolf). An excerpt of this book appears in NER 35.2. His reflection, “On Restlessness,” can be read in full online.

From Publishers Weekly: “Abundant autobiographical glimpses lend substance and specificity to Phillips’s tenet that ‘art and life are forever part of the same thing.’ Phillips analyzes individual poems by Shakespeare, Herbert, Shelley, Frost, Gunn, and others, along with his own work. The result is a slim volume memorable for delicate
insights . . . and for its grounding of theory in the life and personality of the poet.”

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013), Double Shadow (2011), and Rest of Love (2004). He is the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

” . . . his poems, more than anyone else’s, take the shape of fire, all its ambiguity and wind-shreddedness, all its likeness to poppies in the wheat.” —H. K. Hix

Eric Pankey has published his tenth poetry collection, Dismantling the Angel (Parlor Press, 2014). Pankey has been appeared in several issues of NER,most recently in 34.1.

“In these precise, dream-like poems, Eric Pankey peers through the clarifying lens of metaphor and parable to meditate on mystery, human sympathy and the divine. Here, the shifting image of fire both articulates and consumes our sense of the vastness of history and the ineffable nature of divinity.”—Kevin Prufer

Pankey’s other publications include The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Trace. He is Professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.

“Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power as she considers illness and mortality through exacting, imaginative poems.”

Laura Kasischke’s newest collection of poetry, The Infinitesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014) is now out with strong reviews. Her work appears most recently in NER34.2.

From Publisher’s Weekly: The brevity of Kasischke’s lines movingly captures the absence of death and the limitations on memory, and her mastery of meticulous, though seemingly effortless, description shines throughout, as when she dubs a cake once baked for her father as “Soggy church bell on a plate,” or describes a tumor as a “terrible frog/ Of moonlight and dampness on a log.”

Laura Kasischke has published nine novels and eight previous collections of poetry. For her collection, Space, in Chains, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

“It’s the music, the beauty, after all, that’s balm to all this sorrow. The American reminds me of this.” —Ross Gay

Longtime NER contributor David Roderick has published his poetry collection, The Americans with the University of Pittsburgh Press.His work has previously appeared in NER issues 24.2 and 32.1.

“The Americans is a compelling meditation on the ways we go about our lives at this cultural moment, often unmoored from the facts of history though we drift along its shores. Part complicated love letter to suburbia, these poems demand that we consider not only what we are drawn to but also what we fail to see, how the apocryphal feeds our cultural amnesia. The poet asks: ‘Must nostalgia / walk like a prince through all our rooms?’ This lovely collection shows us a way to confront that question within ourselves.” —Natasha Tretheway, U.S. Poet Laureate

David Roderick’s first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize. He is a recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and he currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

New York Times bestselling novelist Susan Vreeland is back with the publication of Lisette’s List. Her short story, “Love Burning,” was featured in NER 20.2.

Susan Vreeland is the author of four New York Times bestselling novels—The Passion of Artemisia, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Clara and Mr. Tiffany, and Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television drama. Her books have been translated into 26 languages.

“Vreeland’s ability to make this complex historical novel as luminous as a Tiffany lamp is nothing less than remarkable.”—The Washington Post

“Vreeland’s writing is so graceful, her research so exhaustive, that a reader is enfolded in the world of Tiffany and Driscoll.”—Los Angeles Times

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”